News

Celebrating New Faculty and Esteemed Women Leaders at Tandon

October 3, 2017

While presiding over a welcome reception last month, Dean Katepalli Sreenivasan offered sage words of wisdom for engineering faculty at NYU Tandon. An educator himself for more than 35 years, he encouraged them to strive for the highest standards for themselves and their work, and to teach with social responsibility and the future in mind. “In my own thinking about personal responsibility, I believe that if you invest time on an institution, it always pays off. You and our students are the ones who make an institution what you think it ought to be in the coming years.”

The event centered on welcoming the newest faculty members to the NYU Tandon community. Dean Sreenivasan and others lauded the numerous accomplishments of the new faculty cohort, who have expertise in a variety of fields — from an anthropological approach to the human gut microbiome, to understanding complex urban systems through geographic information systems (GIS), to polymer characterization and colloidal science.

Among the many luminaries joining Tandon are Tom Marzetta, the originator of Massive MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output) — one of the foundations of 5G wireless technology — and former Director of Communications and Statistical Sciences at Bell Labs; David Shimko, whose previous posts include VP and Head of Commodity Derivatives & Credit Risk Management Research at JPMorgan and co-founder of Risk Capital; and Dora Angelaki, a member of the National Academy of Sciences whose research explores multisensory information flows within the brain and computational neuroscience. Read more about these and more new members of the Tandon faculty.

As part of the school’s commitment to supporting more women in engineering, the reception honored some of the many esteemed women leaders at Tandon who are transforming the engineering landscape. As co-founder and director of The GovLab, Beth Noveck explores how technology can change the way institutions govern. Elza Erkip’s pioneering research into next-generation wireless communications has earned her multiple laurels, such as the 2016 IEEE Communications Society WICE Outstanding Achievement Award. Semiha Ergan’s work merges architecture, virtual reality, and human interaction and she received the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Investigator Career Award. A long-time contributor to DARPA’s Memex program, Juliana Freire maps the deep web and is the first woman chair of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Management of Data. Anne-Laure Fayard’s focus on social impact through collaborative design thinking garnered her the 2017 Tandon Distinguished Teaching Award.

“I hope all of you have as a great a time as an academic as I’ve had for many years,” Dean Sreenivasan shared as he celebrated the accomplished faculty at Tandon. “There’s no better place in the universe than being in a good academic setting, but, be mindful that we must build this place together.”

The reception also took a moment to congratulate faculty on their recent promotions, including:

Tandon Welcomes New AI Research Center

Dean Sreenivasan welcomed two new members of the Technology, Culture and Society (TCS) department – Kate Crawford and Meredith Whittaker – who are spearheading Artificial Intelligence Now, also known as AI Now. The new research center at NYU focuses on the social and economic impacts of artificial intelligence technologies that are now a part of daily life. Crawford, a TCS distinguished research professor, is a principal researcher at Microsoft AI, a Senior Fellow at the NYU Information Law Institute, and a co-founder of NSF’s Council for Big Data, Ethics & Society. Whittaker, a TCS distinguished research scientist, is the founder and lead of Google’s Open Research Group, founder of Measurement Lab, and co-founder of Simply Secure.

Camila RyderGraduate School of Arts and Science
Master of Arts in English Literature, Class of 2018